Sondra Radvanovsky

Sondra Radvanovsky is often cited as one of the great Verdi sopranos of her time. She has sung a variety of Verdi roles to critical acclaim: Aida, Leonora (Il Trovatore), and Elisabetta (Don Carlo), but her repertory is hardly limited to Verdi, as it takes in Puccini (Tosca), Mozart (Donna Anna from Don Giovanni), Donizetti (Lucrezia Borgia), and many others. Radvanovsky has appeared in more than 200 performances at the Met and sung at all of the world's major opera houses, including the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and Covent Garden, as well as prestigious operatic venues in North America. She has also done recital and concert work, with appearances in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Verdi's Requiem, and Rossini's Stabat Mater. Radvanovsky was born in Berwyn, Illinois, on April 11, 1969. She studied music at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and Tanglewood Music Center. In addition, she graduated from the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1995, Radvanovsky won the Met's National Council Auditions and appeared at the Met Concert Gala that year to sing Aida's aria "Ritorna vincitor." Her official operatic debut there was in 1996 as Countess Ceprano in Verdi's Rigoletto. She sang mostly smaller roles at major opera houses in the early years of her career. The new century brought new life: at the Met in 2000, Radvanovsky sang Gutrune in Wagner's Ring and Musetta in Puccini's La bohème. She scored an international triumph in the role of Hélène in Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes at the Paris Opera in 2003. That year, she underwent successful surgery to remove a node from her vocal cords. In 2005, Radvanovsky sang Roxane in the U.S. premiere of Franco Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac at the Met, and the following February sang the role again at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain. Performances from the latter production were issued in 2009 on a Naxos DVD. Radvanovsky's first solo recording, Verdi Arias, was issued on the Delos label in 2010. The following year, Radvanovsky hosted The Met: Live in HD performances, which broadcasts the theater's live productions to movie theaters. She remained quite busy in the 2010s and into the 2020s, appearing at major opera houses and concert halls around the world. During the Met's 2015-2016 season, she performed Donizetti's three "Tudor Queen" roles (Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda, and Roberto Devereux, as Elisabeth I), becoming the first to accomplish the feat with the famed company. Following this experience, Radvanovsky, the Lyric Opera of Chicago president and director Anthony Freud, and conductor Riccardo Frizza devised the program The Three Queens, which presented the fully-staged final scenes of the three Donizetti operas. The program premiered in 2019 at the Lyric Opera and was recorded and released in 2022 on the PentaTone Classics label. That year, Radvanovsky presented a concert version of The Three Queens at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Italy, and returned to the Met for that company's first-ever performance of the rarely performed Cherubini opera, Medea.
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